The following discussion of the background to the invention is intended to facilitate an understanding of the present invention only. It should be appreciated that the discussion is not an acknowledgement or admission that any of the material referred to was published, known or part of the common general knowledge of the person skilled in the art in any jurisdiction as at the priority date of the invention.
Existing accommodation reservation systems, such web services provided by Airbnb™ or HomeAway™, provide online portals for users to post accommodation offers for lodgings that they own or occupy. In most cases, the users of the accommodation reservation systems are homeowners and not professional hoteliers. These accommodation reservation systems that match users looking for short term accommodation needs with other users seeking to rent their lodgings are often termed as short termed rental reservation systems.
The users who seek to rent out their accommodations are often termed as hosts. These short term rental hosts suffer from many pain points. Firstly, these hosts have to coordinate key exchanges with their guests who check in at different times of the day, even if the hosts are away or asleep. Secondly, many of the guests may not remember to turn off the home appliances, for example air conditioners, while they are away during their stay, resulting in substantial energy waste. Another problem is that the guest's preferences, for example that the guests prefers for the temperature of the room, are not brought across to different hotels he or she is staying in.
Current approaches require heavy investment in infrastructure and require installation in many rooms to achieve operational efficiency to achieve economies of scale. They are hence expensive and not suitable for short term rental hosts with the apartment or room to rent out. Present approaches adopted by the short term rental hosts to solving these pain points include key delivery services which is labour intensive and expensive; the cost for such services can be as high up to 10% of amount paid for reserving the accommodation. Hence there exists a need for the provision of affordable premise accommodation management system to short term rental hosts for alleviating one or more of the aforementioned problems.